The semiotics of buzz
“Maeterlinck uses the expression ‘The Spirit of the Beehive’ to name the powerful, enigmatic and paradoxical force that the bees seem to obey, and that the reason of man has never come to understand”
(Victor Erice, in an interview on his movie El espíritu de la colmena, 1973)
Creating buzz, enhancing buzz, monitoring buzz, are nowadays marketing and advertisement imperatives. There is virtually no commercial producer in the world who does not dream about surrounding its products, and their potential consumers, into a persistent, stupefying, seductive buzz. New digital technologies of communication, above all social networks, are turning buzz into a sort of religion: you are nobody if you are not preceded by buzz. What you do is nothing if it is not immersed into buzz even before it comes about.
But what is the buzz about buzz? How can semiotics observe, describe, and analyze the processes that lead to the creation, multiplication, transformation, and finally disappearing of buzz? Moreover, how can semiotics predict what consequences buzz culture will have on the way we create, share, remember and forget meaning and its artifacts?
Relying on previous theories of cultural contagion (Landowski, Sperber) and viral communication, the paper will try to explore the following hypothesis: the culture of buzz prevents us from living in the present: excitement replaces understanding, anticipation supplants delectation, and what we are left with, eventually, is the obtunding sound of a drone.